Thomas, A Secret Life

by A. J. B. Johnston

  Thomas grimaces at Hélène. Fine, he concludes in a hurry, maybe this whole visit was a mistake. If he’d known it was her, would he still have come? It’s hard to say.... No, of course, he would.

  “Look,” he says, moving closer to where she stands, holding onto the chair and staring out into the darkening night, “I know there’s no going back.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So?”

  “So.”

  “So maybe I should go?”

  “Maybe you should.”

  Thomas turns and takes the first step toward the door. But then he hears Hélène exhale, as deep a sigh as he has ever heard. It makes him turn around. There’s a look on her face that he’s never seen before. It’s the face of someone fighting disappointment yet who is clearly on the edge of tears.

  “What is it? What’s wrong, Hélène?”

  “Wrong?” Hélène’s voice is sharp. The tone is angry but the eyes have a skim of wet. “What’s wrong?” she repeats.

  Her hands flash in the air, like she’s chopping something only she can see.

  Thomas bites his lower lip and stays where he is. He crosses his arms on his chest. He has no idea what to do next. Is she angry or sad? Whatever is it she wants him to do?

  The two of them stand in silence, the eyes of one locked onto the eyes of the other.

  All at once, in a burst of hurried shallow breaths, it is Hélène who gives way. Her shoulders slump and her eyelids close over eyes gone so very hot. They shut out a client of a man and the world of purchased lust to which he belongs. A single tear issues from the corner of one eye. It makes its way down her cheek beside her nose. Thomas closes the distance. He takes her hands off her hips where they seem frozen and he holds them in his own.

  “I don’t feel good,” she says.

  “I see that. Do you want me to go or to stay?”

  Hélène recoils in surprise. Her head swivels left and right until she catches herself and nods that yes he should.

  “Which? Stay or go?”

  Her face pinches and scrunches. Full watery eyes are on the brink. Thomas encircles Hélène in his arms. He presses hard upon her back. That action brings from Hélène a sob unleashed.

  “Not what I wanted,” Hélène gasps into Thomas’s shoulder.

  “I know. I know.”

  Hélène buries her wet salty face, tears streaming hot, into his throat and neck.

  VI

  Conundrum

  Paris

  March–April 1727

  The solution does not come to Thomas all at once. It takes shape in pieces and over time.

  That night, on the walk back to Marguerite’s spacious suite of rooms, after he took Hélène in his arms and tried to comfort her, Thomas could not see that there was anything he could realistically do to help Hélène out of her predicament. Truth be told, or so he said to himself more than once on the walk, poor Hélène has made her bed and had to lie in it. He didn’t say that or anything like it while he was still at her place. Instead, before he set off into the night he held her shoulders firm and tight and bestowed a few parting words of encouragement and a chaste kiss on her troubled brow.

  Over the next few days though, Hélène’s lot in life, and of course her pretty face and form, were never far from his thoughts. He wanted to help, he really did. Yes, he’d like to have her as his lover again, that too. He really would. But he couldn’t see how he could rescue Hélène from her plight. He decided that he would not go back to see her until he had something helpful to say. How long that might take he had no idea.

  From time to time, when he wakes up in the middle of the night or when he is walking along the Seine on his way to or from the magistrate’s office, he feels like there is some looming possibility of a solution lurking just out of mind. Such a solution to the conundrum, however, does not stand and shout, “Over here, I’m over here.” That’s not the way solutions work.

  It is two weeks later and Thomas and Marguerite are at table. They are both pleased with his new wig. It’s stylish and close cropped. Of human hair, of course, with tight curls on the sides and the whole thing dusted with the whitest of white powder and smelling of lavender. A regrettable side effect is that sometimes the powder floats off when he tips his head forward, down into his food. So Thomas tries to keep himself especially erect. As he does so, he learns a secret of the higher born, that a rigid posture is not just about show; there’s the practical side of not snowing too much on one’s food.

  It is while Thomas is at table on this evening that the first inkling of a solution to Hélène’s predicament will come. He and Marguerite are making their way slowly but steadily through the usual stages of their meal. The good servant Simone, hunch-backed as ever, is bringing in and taking away the dishes as the evening progresses. It is a leisurely repast, which Thomas has grown used to since his marriage to Marguerite. It is a pace he did not follow when he lived alone. Generally, the meals at Marguerite’s are good, though this evening’s meal is not one of the better ones. The potage was nearly cold when Simone brought it in and essentially tasteless when sampled. The salad was the usual awful wintry offering. The duck was far too greasy and came with a sauce that was more than a little burned. As a result, it could not hide the fact that the duck and other meats were stringy and tough. The cook is to blame of course, but he’s only filling in while Sébastien is away. Poor Sébastien’s mother died in Cahors and Marguerite granted him a week away. In his absence, Marguerite has given Charles, the lackey, the opportunity he asked for to step in as chef. It hasn’t been a good experiment so far. All this is to say that Marguerite and Thomas are hoping that the dessert will perhaps make them forget what has come before. They’ve been told that it is to be Marguerite’s favourite: a fluffy batter-beaten Savoy cake accompanied by a raspberry coulis.

  Thomas and Marguerite look at each other expectantly as little Simone brings in the sweet culmination to the meal. The servant is in her fifties and originally from Le Puy. She is adept at making and repairing lace. Simone puts the cake down and cuts two ample slices. Next she places in front of each of them their respective dishes containing the coulis, as well as for each a tiny silver spoon. How much each wants of the raspberry topping is up to them. You wouldn’t know it from the non-committal expressions on their stolid faces but Thomas and Marguerite can hardly wait to spread the coulis and sample the cake. Nonetheless, it would be unseemly to start right in.

  “Did I tell you, Thomas, that we’ve received an invitation?”

  “What’s that?” Thomas looks up from what he’s playing at while he waits. He’s killing time manipulating his dessert spoon round and round with his fingers and his thumb.

  “My cousin, the Madame Dufour,” says Marguerite carefully, wondering if she will catch Thomas making a sour face. “Yes, well, I know you two … let’s just say you’re not as fond of each other as I’d like.”

  Thomas says not a thing nor does his face give any more away. He pretends to be immobile in a mask. He is his old friend Collier at his best. He may not see the pale-faced fellow any more, but he remembers a thing or two about keeping a neutral expression intact. Thomas puts down the tiny silver spoon he has been twirling.

  “Well,” Marguerite continues, “my dear cousin will be in the country, in Brittany of course, somewhere near Vitré. It’s a small château of her late husband’s. Le Mesnil it’s called, I believe. Sounds charming, does it not? I’ve never seen it in person. He used to take her there every spring for a couple of months and now it falls to her to go alone. It seems Monsieur won’t be making the trip this time.”

  Marguerite makes big eyes, hoping to encourage Thomas to laugh at the joke. Thomas does not quite laugh, but he does contribute a sputtering noise to show that he understands the humour in what she’s said.

  “She’ll be there a co
uple of months seeing to this and that. Whatever that is in a country life. I wouldn’t be surprised if cousin tries to sell the thing. Anyway, she insists that we come visit her so she’s not completely cut off from the world. I’ve not answered her yet, not with certainty, but it is an obligation I have. That we have.”

  Thomas purses his lips.

  “Who knows, it might be tolerable. A few days in the country. Brittany. What do you think? Shall we have an idyll at our cousin’s Le Mesnil?”

  Thomas knows better than to say no. So he doesn’t say a thing. Instead, he inclines his head twice in Marguerite’s direction slowly and decidedly. It’s a wordless way of communicating that he has picked up from the great magistrate he works for as senior clerk. He’s curious if it will work with his wife. It’s to indicate without saying the words that yes he’s willing to go to the annoying cousin’s château somewhere sometime, as yet another of the growing list of things that he does for his wife. He occasionally wonders if she notices or simply takes him and his acquiescence for granted.

  “It won’t be too bad,” Marguerite replies to the vague nods coming from her husband, “you’ll see.”

  “Of course,” comments Thomas at last. “A few days, I suppose. We should, should we not, after all.” He points his small silver spoon at the plate with Savoy cake in front of him. “Shall we sample?”

  “Here’s hoping the end to the meal is better than all that came before.” Marguerite dips her spoon into the dish with the raspberry coulis and drizzles it across her cake.

  Thomas does the same, only in Thomas’s case he finds his thoughts are suddenly elsewhere. As he spoons the tart sauce onto his slice of cake he thinks of the few whole raspberries that are floating in the pale red coulis. The berries must come from some icehouse where they’ve been kept chilled, no frozen, since last summer. Completely out of the blue, an image of naked Hélène and her raspberry-like nipples flashes through his mind. It sends a message to his loins. “Might come up with something,” Thomas mumbles to the table aloud.

  “Come up with something? Whatever do you mean?” Marguerite lowers to her plate the small square of cake she is holding aloft, inches from her mouth. Her jaw lowers as she stares at her husband. Then she notices what he has done with his plate. It’s covered in a wet blanket of the coulis. “What are you doing?”

  Thomas glances down at his plate. Too late he sees that he has spooned far too much coulis upon his piece of cake. It’s a dessert gone completely red and there’s a line of drizzle across the linen tablecloth connecting his plate to the dish with the sauce. He takes his napkin and covers the red line he’s made across the tabletop.

  “My heavens,” says a stunned Marguerite. “I was asking you something. You said, ‘something might come up’ … oh never mind.” Marguerite blinks away her husband’s absent-minded mess on the other side of the table. She brings the fork to her mouth and finally tastes the dessert.

  Thomas follows suit, and no sooner does he have the mix of sweet and tart running across his palate than his thoughts again swing back to Hélène. The Hélène he recalls is not the courtesan of two weeks ago but the younger girl he knew in the roadside inn in Évreux. He pictures the two of them standing naked back to back upon the mattress in the storage room, their buttocks pressing together, each with their arms backward around the other’s belly.

  “Ass to ass is holy backwards kiss,” he’d bellowed like a preacher in a pulpit.

  “Shush, that’s blasphemy,” Hélène whispered over her shoulder.

  “Who cares?” Thomas said as he spun round. She did the same and facing they lavished kisses on each other’s mouths and chests while their hands probed and tugged.

  Marguerite glances over to see if Thomas is enjoying the cake, or if he perhaps finds it a tad too tart, which is her assessment. She is surprised by the faraway, delighted expression on her husband’s face.

  “Something amusing?” She squints at her husband, suspicious about what’s going on. She can’t believe a slice of Savoy cake and coulis can all by itself bring a look of satisfaction like that. It has to be a recollection. And her guess is that it’s of a woman who is not herself.

  Thomas stops licking his lips. He finds a focus on his wife. He wonders how much she can guess of what’s been running through his mind. He brings a hand to his lap to settle what is rising up.

  “The raspberries, good are they not?”

  “Hmm,” says Marguerite, discerning a lie, but one she leaves alone. “They’re all right.”

  “It’s like having summer all over again.”

  “So you say.”

  One of the candles in the candelabra in the centre of the table starts to gutter. Thomas glances toward Marguerite. She is staring downward, glumly at what she has decided is a beginner’s mushy attempt at cake. Her husband’s gaze goes back to the candle that sputters and spumes. When the flame extinguishes itself, the first piece of the puzzle about Hélène’s situation takes shape in Thomas’s mind. He blinks at the simplicity of the idea. Have my cake and eat it too, he thinks. He silently mouths the expression a second time, ensuring his lips barely move.

  The sound of footsteps on his right makes Thomas glance round. It’s little Simone padding quietly back into the room. She stands quietly, waiting to clear away the plates when the dessert is finished. That’s when for Thomas the next puzzle piece falls into place.

  —

  When Hélène hears Thomas explain his plan she agrees to go along. She’s hardly enthusiastic about it because it sounds more like a possibility of a possibility. But it’s better than nothing at all. As she waits for Thomas to implement his end of the arrangement Hélène continues to ply her trade. She has to make ends meet. Still, she agrees to get together with Thomas once a week, as long as the rendezvous does not involve sex and is not in her rooms. She has to keep separate the different parts of her life. Except when it’s too chilly and damp, Hélène prefers the meetings to be outdoors. She especially likes the Place Dauphine. She likes the enclosing square and knowing that the reassuring statue of Henri IV is not far away. When the weather does not cooperate, however, they meet in the entrance to a church. Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre is one they’ve used twice. Thomas suggested it and seemed to think it amusing, though he never tells Hélène why that might be.

  Wherever they meet, the rendezvous is brief, business-like even. Thomas gives updates on what he has done so far and that’s about it. Hélène rarely has much to say, though she does occasionally nod her approval at this and that. Once in a while she suggests something specific he might want to consider to improve on his plan. A few times Thomas pleads his case that maybe she should begin to show him her favours, to remind both of them of the affection ahead that they will eventually share.

  “You know,” says Thomas to begin one meeting in the Place Dauphine, “this place, where we meet, it’s called the sex of Paris?”

  Hélène gives a quizzical look. “Why’s that?”

  “Its triangular shape.”

  “I see,” she says. And then shakes her head. “No.”

  “Not even just to stroke the kitty?”

  “Especially not the kitty. Not until … not until things are done.”

  A week later, both of them soaked from the pounding rain and standing just inside Saint-Julien-le Pauvre, Thomas whispers in her ear. “I can’t see how a little something would be so wrong. I can be quick.”

  “Look,” Hélène whispers back, “there will be no slippery dip until I say. You just do your part, all right?”

  Thomas’s eyelashes flutter. He thinks “slippery dip” is charming in a dirty sort of way.

  “For this scheme to work,” she continues with raised eyebrows and a quick darting look, “we need a rabula rasa.”

  Thomas hears “rabble rouser,” which makes no sense. “What’s that?”

&nbs
p; “It’s Latin for clean slate.”

  “Oh, tabula rasa.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Thomas is about to say something, but Hélène warns him with her eyes to leave it at that.

  “I wasn’t always wrestling naked with Voltaire. We talked ideas as well. I know who John Locke is, for instance. Besides being a dead Englishman. He wrote about a social contract in which we governed give our consent.”

  Thomas gives Hélène a smile of genuine surprise. “Well said,” is all he can reply. The woman is a marvel. He cannot wait for them to be together again, and apparently for more than just sex.

  The plan is this: Thomas is taking and hiding a piece of jewellery from Marguerite once a week for as long as it takes. When Marguerite notices that they’re “missing” – she hasn’t yet – the objects will turn up in the small cabinet where the hunch-backed servant Simone sleeps. Simone will be fired and Hélène hired in her place. Its simplicity is its beauty, Thomas tells Hélène each time they meet, earnestness in his eyes. He does not mention that his inspiration for the little plot was to have cake and eat it too. There’s no need to tell Hélène that she is his cake.

  Whether it might be right or wrong to dismiss Simone, a loyal servant to Marguerite for eleven years going on twelve, is not something Thomas and Hélène speak of at all. Thomas does quite like Simone, and not just for her deference and her noticeably clean hands. They occasionally exchange small jokes, or smiles at the least. So he regrets that the hunched-over servant has to go. However, there is an axiom he’s heard that applies in this case. For someone to rise, someone else has to fall. It just happens in this case that the someone is little Simone.

  —

  Thomas carries out the small thefts the plan calls for – a necklace of silver with precious stones of pale blue and dark green, a ring with onyx, a cameo miniature, and a pearl-coloured comb – while Marguerite is out of the house or at least preoccupied in a faraway room. None of the objects lies out in the open, which would mean they might be too quickly missed. Each has its own little box or velvet sack. Along with dozens of other jewels Marguerite possesses, they normally reside deep within the inlaid wooden box atop the dressing table near her mirror. Only once was a swift removal by Thomas nearly caught soon after it happened. As luck would have it, it was the servant Simone herself. She was coming down the hall with an armload of linen when she saw Thomas coming out of Madame’s room.